VMware Virtual SAN

Christos Karamanolis, VMware

Kiran Madnani, VMware

James Streit, Thomson Reuters

STO5391

#STO5391

2

Agenda

Software Defined Storage

What is Virtual SAN?

Product overview

Software/Hardware Requirements

Use Cases

Customer use-case

Beta

Summary

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Software-Defined Data Center

Software-Defined Storage

SDDC | SDS

All infrastructure is virtualized

and delivered as a service, and

the control of this data center is

entirely automated by software.

Heterogeneous storage resources

are abstracted into logical pools,

consumed and managed through

app-centric policy-based

automation

4

VMware Approach to Software-Defined Storage

Software-Defined Storage

Virtualized Data Plane

Shared

Storage

VM-centric Data Services

Policy-Driven Control Plane

HDD SSD

Server Direct

Attached

Extensible

framework for

ecosystem of VM-

centric data

services.

Common

management model

based on VM-level

policies

Hypervisor-based

pooling of

heterogeneous

storage resources

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Introducing Virtual SAN (VSAN)

VMware vCenter Server

Product Overview

• Scale out storage built into the

hypervisor

• Software solution - Uses industry

standard components

• Clusters direct attached disks and

flash

• Flash-optimized converged

compute + storage solution

• vSphere integrated management

VMware vSphere

VSAN

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Introducing Virtual SAN (VSAN)

Features

• Dynamic and capacity

performance scaling

• Shared storage properties

• High Resiliency – Distributed

RAID; No single points of failure

• High Performance – Flash based

read & write cache

• VM-Centric management

• Automated SLA management

VMware vCenter Server

VMware vSphere

VSAN

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Product Overview

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What is Virtual SAN?

vSphere

Distributed Storage

Distributed software built in the hypervisor

Uses local storage (Flash, HDD) on ESX hosts

Converged storage-compute platform

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VSAN configuration

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Platform scaling

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VSAN “datastore”

vSphere

Distributed Storage

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VSAN growth

vSphere

Distributed Storage

As disks are added, the datastore size grows

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Data availability and reliability via redundancy

vSphere

Distributed Storage

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Performance acceleration via Flash

vSphere

Distributed Storage

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VM-centric storage management

Policies: A set of SLAs to be enforced during the VM’s lifecycle

Storage Policy Specification

Capacity

Tolerate “n” Failures Availability

Reserve x% Flash Performance

Reserve 20%

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Gold Profile

Size

4x 9’s Availability

Reserve 200 Limit

1000

IOPs

Reserve 20%

Gold Profile

Size

4x 9’s Availability

Reserve 200 Limit

1000

IOPs

Reserve 20%

Profiles: Policy Templates

Profiles: Pre-defined policy templates

Storage Policy Specification

Capacity

Tolerate “n” Failures Availability

Performance

Reserve 20%

Reserve x% Flash

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Object-level SLA Management

vSphere

Virtual SAN

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VM data distribution example

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IO Flow

vSphere

Virtual SAN

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Cluster-wide storage accessibility

vSphere

Virtual SAN

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Data Reconfiguration for SLA compliance

vSphere

Virtual SAN

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Performance analysis tools

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Tolerating Failures

vSphere

Virtual SAN

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VSAN Requirements

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Requirements

At least 3 x ESXi hosts running version 5.5

1 x vCenter server running version 5.5

Each host containing at least 1 empty SSD & 1 empty HDD

1Gb or 10Gb network between hosts

Virtual Networking configured; all hosts to have VSAN network.

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VSAN Hardware Requirements

SAS/SATA Controller or RAID

Controller must work in

passthru/JBOD/HBA mode*

SAS/SATA/PCIe SSD

SAS/SATA HDD

1Gb/10Gb NIC

Server on

vSphere HCL

* Required for optimal performance

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Broad Partner Support

and many more…

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Use Cases

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• Handle peak performance such as boot, login, read/write

storms

• Seamless granular scaling without huge upfront investments

• Support high VDI density

• Rapid storage provisioning and complete automation

• Ideal price/performance

• Minimizes data center footprint

• Integrated with vSphere Replication and VMware SRM

• Reduces cost of storage

• Minimizes data center footprint

VMware Virtual SAN – Initial Use Cases

Virtual Desktop

(VDI)

Tier 2 / Tier 3

Test and Dev

Private Cloud

DR

Target

Site A Site B

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Performance

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VSAN Delivers The Same VDI Density As An All SSD Array At 25% Of The Cost

• View Planner performance testing maximum VDI density on a 3 host scale

• Estimated based on 2013 street pricing, Capex (includes storage hardware + software license costs). Additional savings come from reduced Opex

through automation.

• Virtual SAN pricing configuration: 8 VMs per core, with 40GB per VM, 2 copies for availability and 10% SSD for performance

288 VMs

View Planner Benchmark (3 hosts cluster, 36 cores)

VSAN cost per desktop is 25% the

cost of All SSD

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Virtual SAN Reduces The Cost Of Storage For VDI And Enables Granular Predictable Scaling

Sto

rag

e c

ost

per

deskto

p

Number of desktops

• Compared to external storage at scale

• Estimated based on 2013 street pricing, Capex (includes storage hardware + Software License costs)

• Additional savings come from reduced Opex through automation

• Virtual SAN configuration: 9 VMs per core, with 40GB per VM, 2 copies for availability and 10% SSD for performance

VSAN enables predictable linear

scaling

Spikes correspond to scaling out due to IOPs requirements

Virtual SAN External Storage

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VMware Virtual SAN Delivers Radically Simple Storage For Your VMs

• Estimated based on 2013 street pricing, Capex (includes storage hardware + software license costs)

• Additional savings come from reduced Opex through automation

• Configuration assume 10TB dual socket hosts 2 data copies for availability and 10% SSD for performance

8 node Virtual SAN cluster

provides 80-100k IOPS

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Customer Use Case

Thomson Reuters

• Services and products for financial, risk, legal, tax and accounting,

intellectual property, science, and media markets

• Employs approximately 60,000 people and operates in over 100

countries

• The world’s largest international multimedia news provider delivering

news in more than 20 different languages. A billion people are

reached by Thomson Reuters News and Insights every day.

• Data Center Operations

80 vCenter’s

2,200 + ESXi hosts

35,000 virtual machines

Initial Use Cases

• Reduce datastore complexity

• Contain storage IO workloads Test / Dev

• Reduce infrastructure costs

• Quick deployment

• Self contained environments

Data Center Consolidation

• Reduce storage administration

• Increased VM performance

• Availability zones Private Cloud

The Lab

• HP DL380 Gen8

• 256 GB RAM

• 800 GB SSD

• 900 GB 10K SAS

• H220 controller for vSAN

• P420i controller for OS

• 10 GB networking

• 3 to 6 nodes

Performance

• Exceeds our workload requirements

• Stripes, copies & VMDK’s

• Ensure network is robust

• Great storage views – RVC Observer

Takeaway: Understand your workload

Stability

• 30+ tests

• Number of object copies

• Component failure

• Stress testing

Experiences with vSAN beta

• Super easy to setup and get running

• Use stripes & copies appropriately

• Disk space capacity planning

• Understand your workload

• Features for initial release

• Performance, stability and usability

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Want VSAN?

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• It’s free

• It’s as easy as installing vSphere

• It gives you the chance to win an iPad!

Register for Virtual SAN Beta Now!

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Summary

VMware vCenter Server

Native to ESX hypervisor -

improves resource efficiency and

low latency

First storage platform architected

for VM-level data operations and

management

Built from ground up using Policy-

Driven Management principles

vSphere integrated management

Radically simple - built for the

virtualization admin

Radically Simple Enterprise Storage

Significantly lower TCO without compromising performance

VMware vSphere

VSAN

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Other VMware Activities Related to This Session

HOL:

HOL-SDC-1308

Virtual Storage Solutions

Group Discussions:

STO1001-GD

VSAN with Cormac Hogan and VMware R&D Engineers

VMware Sessions:

STO4973:

VMware Virtual SAN Panel discussion

STO5027:

VMware Virtual SAN Technical Best Practices

THANK YOU

VMware Virtual SAN

Christos Karamanolis, VMware

Kiran Madnani, VMware

James Streit, Thomson Reuters

STO5391

#STO5391

54

What Is Virtual SAN?

Built for performance,

resilience and scale

Converged compute-

storage VMware vSphere

VSAN

Software-defined storage

platform

Per-VM SLA management

Tightly integrated with

vSphere constructs

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Benefits of SDS

• Per VM storage management

• Policy based storage automation

• Radically simple storage - designed for the vSphere admin

Simplified storage management

• Choice of industry standard components

• Increased storage efficiency and agility

Lower cost of ownership

• Hypervisor storage abstraction to uniquely match VM requirements and hardware capabilities

End-to-End SLA Delivery

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VSAN Delivers Significantly Lower TCO For Comparable Performance

Leverage inexpensive server disks for shared storage

Purely software-defined storage without specialized

hardware

Boost productivity with storage automation

Reduce power, space, cooling costs with smaller

hardware footprint

• Avoid large upfront storage investments

Scale storage performance and capacity granularly